You win some, you lose some. Second City won handsomely with their last show, which was the best in recent memory. They lose heavily with its successor, We’ve Totally (probably) Got This!, which may be the worst. Fair’s fair. This is the rare Second City revue whose title has something to do with the goods on offer. In fact, it even turns up in the dialogue. The words are uttered by a mall security team dealing with a break-in at Reitmans. (Let no one say the show doesn’t confront real-life events.) Two of the guards are young and male and reasonably spry, but they are obliged to defer to their supervisor, who is older and female and has to be helped up and down the ladders that she insists on scaling. This is fairly funny when it starts but it then does nothing but repeat itself. That’s the problem with most of the evening. It oscillates between taking passable ideas and beating them into the ground, and taking hopeless ones and doing the same.

[np-related]

There is a theme, or a tone, going through the show. At its beginning, at its end, and at several points in between, we get to watch the cast of six rocking in their seats in what might be a bus, a plane or even a rather large car, while lights flash on and off like crazy and the sound levels do their best to terrify us. The message might be politely paraphrased as “something terrible is going to happen,” and now, as at most times, that is hard to argue with. However, if this show is trying to get down to political cases, it’s doing a very woolly job of it. A one-liner about Rob Ford’s motoring mishaps isn’t enough to save a painfully repetitive sketch about legal sharks capitalizing on driving disasters. (Repetition, in this context, means a running gag that won’t run.) Nor does mentioning Stephen Harper automatically qualify as political satire, even in a sketch where one of the characters claims to be the PM’s daughter, and sings a song about it.

The number in question is set in a Curves exercise salon, and it does have its moments: moments when the dictated moves become excessively, well, dictatorial, culminating in one called the Sieg Heil manoeuvre, which drives one of the shyer company members out of the room in silent and understatedly funny protest. There’s a promising sketch at the beginning of the first half in which a married couple agree to sign any mortgage arrangement rather than go back and face the bank again (we’ve all been there) and then get down to telling their son to “check your attitude” every time his school assignments prove he’s smarter than they are. But it, too, doesn’t so much build as repeat. Ditto for an even more promising sketch at the start of the second half, in which two desperately cheerful Haitian entertainers called Marco and Paolo (or just Marco Polo) offer some mordant insights into the state of their country’s health care, or just of their country. They also quiz the audience, one of whom on my night admitted to be studying for a degree in education. “Aah,” said Marco, unless it was Paolo, “you’re studying studying.” Nice. And if insouciantly dark is what you’re looking for, I recommend a sketch in which two soldiers cope with the request of their mortally wounded buddy not to die a virgin. It develops in a manner oddly reminiscent of Kiss of the Spider Woman.

That, though, is about all I can recommend. Well, that and a musical number in which the three ladies in the cast sing about how about how Canadian women envy Brazilian women their sexiness, and then switch accents to state the reverse. It’s rather convincing. Far more typical, though, is a sketch — again, praiseworthily drawn from the recent news — about schoolkids bullying their bus driver. The cast get somebody up from the audience and egg him on (it was a “him” on the night I went) to do the tormenting for them. This means that the sketch ceases to be about the humiliation of the driver and instead becomes about the humiliation of a member of the public. All right, the victim in question didn’t seem all that humiliated — in fact, his enforced ad-libs compared favourably with those of the professionals — but it still left the number feeling pointless and bloated. Onstage audience participation — as opposed to just taking suggestions from the house and improvising, as in the Haiti sketch — has become far too common a crutch at Second City. It leaves the material looking pointless and bloated, which is what happens here. It doesn’t help that they seem especially proud of this sketch and refer back to it later. This kind of subliminal reprise can be delightful when it works, but not when it reminds you of something that you didn’t much enjoy in the first place.

Camellia Koo has designed a set suggestive of a large, bare room, incorporating an upper level that, other than in the mall number, hardly gets used. Its false proscenium is surmounted by two long rows of books, or at least by drawings thereof, which could be a comment on something, though I’m not sure what.

Seven talented performers are involved, though one of them, Melody A. Johnson, functions only as director, in which capacity she does not seem to be doing her funniest work. There’s a lot of shouting and screaming, and a distinct — or rather indistinct — lack of clarity and point. Carly Heffernan does most of the heavy lifting among the women, with Ashley Comeau and Stacey McGunnigle as backup. Among the men, Alastair Forbes is an invaluable lanky raconteur and de facto master of ceremonies. Jason DeRosse, alternately bumptious and victimized, is appealing in both guises, though starved of good material. Similarly underserved is Nigel Downer, who gets his biggest moment as a rap poet, offering new twists on nursery rhymes suggested from the house. He looks great doing them, even though hardly any of his new spoken words are intelligible. In fact, he’s best when flatly refusing a source and passing instantly on to the next. One that nobody came up with at my visit was the saga of the little girl with the curl, whose particular qualities would seem to be especially apposite to Second City: when they’re good they can be very, very good. When they’re not … well, you know how it goes.

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